Reflections on the 2024 English Literature Advanced Placement Reading

Once again I was assigned to read essays from the Advanced Placement English Literature exam. Readers can use the search function on this site or click on the “Entrance Exams” menu options to see more comments from previous years. I have posted observations after doing the reading since 2014, though not every year. I also found some notes from 2005 which I posted more recently. Here are some ideas that I thought about this time as was reading student essays.

Each exam has three essays: one on a poetry selection, one on a prose selection, and one in which the writer chooses a book with which to answer a thematic question. This year I had the poetry question. I have been a reader seventeen times since 2003 (I missed a few years for one reason or another), and I have had the poetry question thirteen or fourteen times. This is a question I am familiar with.

This year’s question was based on an 1868 poem by John Rollin Ridge. Ridge is probably best known for his novel Joaquin Murieta, the first novel written by a Native American in the United States. Compared to the poetry question from other years, this poem seemed accessible to most readers.

Students who had read poems from different time periods did better and were less likely to misread things in the poem. As is true of poetry even into the twentieth century, the poem “To a Star Seem at Twilight” uses the second person singular, thee and thou. It would help the student to understand that verbs used with thou normally end in -st.

Students who have read Shakespeare plays, for example, would recognize this. A scene in Julius Caesar where Brutus and Cassius are arguing is sometimes called the Durst Scene, because they trade that verb back and forth a number of times: “thou durst” (i.e., “you dare”).

I would sometimes tease my own students that some of them were paragraph atheists. That is, they did not believe in paragraphs. Try to imagine a whole book without paragraph breaks. It would be very difficult to read! Even if it were readable, it would be hard to follow the writer’s train of thought.

Paragraphs really help the reader follow your ideas. Use them! I am certain there were students who missed a point or two on their essays simply because they did not use paragraphs, so it was hard for the reader to distinguish one point from another or follow the train of thought.

A few students had vocabulary problems: Not so much with the poem’s vocabulary other than the use of thou and thee, but with the choice of words in their responses. Think about what the words you are writing actually mean. Some essays used fancy-sounding terms when a simpler term would be more accurate. I tell my students, for example, there is a difference between simple and simplistic. A simple solution is usually a good thing. A simplistic solution never is. Beware of vocabulary inflation.

I also noted a wider use of forms of them as singular. I wrote about this when I reviewed the 2021 AP Exam, so I am not going to repeat myself, except to say it is becoming more common.

There are two other writing skills that can help make an effective essay. First is obvious, but worth repeating: Focus on the thesis. With the new scoring system that gives a point for the thesis along with some of the training materials and videos posted on AP Central, it seems that more students at least come up with a thesis on the essay. However, sometimes the essays end up with a different topic form the thesis or go down some “rabbit trail” that does not related to the thesis. Keep it focused. (Using paragraphs can help you keep your focus as you write.)

Second, if you can, close on a major point or an effective summary. Now readers understand that sometimes students run out of time, and most readers give the benefit of the doubt. But if a student can make a strong point—even better if a student can note some significance—that helps to impress the reader. As you wrap things up, ask yourself, “So what?” The “so-whatness” makes the best thesis.

In the case of “To a Star Seen at Twilight,” the best essays often noted that the poem reflected a romantic view of nature. (Here I am talking about the romantic movement, not love stories.) A few even noted that it sounded like Transcendentalism. Essays that picked up on those ideas usually knew what they were talking about and added something positive to the discussion.

The best essays often related the work to other works. A theme of the poem comes from the last line:

‘Tis great! ‘Tis great to be alone!

Some pointed out that Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter was in many ways its strongest and most noble character. She gained that strength of character because she was isolated from most of the people of Boston for a long time. Similarly, there is a famous line from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that says;

I stood
Among them but not of them. (3.113.6-7)

Examples like those demonstrate literacy and reading ability that is expected at the college level, so it is effective for someone looking for advanced placement in college.

So much has to do with using evidence. Sometimes a misreading or misunderstanding can still gain a decent score on an essay if the student can support the claim. For example, some students took that line about being alone to be sarcasm. After all, who really likes being alone? Now, when we look at the whole poem, it seems clear that the poet admires the star’s solitude, but if the student made a decent case referring to other lines in the poem, the essay would still get points for using evidence.

Back in 2005, a group of eight readers for the English Literature Advanced Placement Test essays got together to make the following list from their experience of each of them reading a thousand or more essays. What works? What doesn’t? Here are their tips. Note that most of these would apply to all kinds of writing, not just tests, and not just in English class.

Do…
• Read the selections carefully. Don’t let anxiety rush you.
• Trust your interpretations once you have committed to them.
• Trust your feelings in addition to your thoughts.
• Back up whatever you say with text from the prompt/selection.
• Think about how to structure your essay before you start writing it.
• Organize your thoughts before you begin.
• Write more than a page.
• Focus first on what the author is saying, not on what outside sources may say.
• End with your strongest points.
• Create meaningful separate, cohesive paragraphs.
• Use transitions.
• Elaborate.
• Write legibly.

Don’t…
• Mention a literary term without giving the supporting quotation and then explaining the how and why of its usage.
• Point out rhyme scheme/meter unless you can give a supporting reason for its usage.
• Make observations unless you are going to discuss their significance.
• Use a term you don’t know the meaning of.
• Over-shorten quotations to the point they make no sense to the reader as an independent statement: “And so Tom…dark.”
• Write about what is there unless you can write about why it matters.
• Worry about expounding on the greatness of the author.
• Begin with “Throughout the history of mankind…” or other general statements.
• Begin with “There are many things to compare and contrast in…” or other generalities that at best only restate the prompt.

Once again, I was a reader for the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition Exam. Let me make a few additional observations in addition to those I have made on previous readings. The best way to see previous comments is to click on the Entrance Exams menu choice above or to the side.

I have pled with students to write legibly. That is even more important now since no one reads actual test booklets. Instead, the booklets are scanned, so readers are reading a scanned copy on a computer monitor or laptop screen. This makes deciphering handwriting even more difficult. We were told that the online tests’ average score was higher than the written tests’ average score. I suspect much of that had to do with reading handwriting. If the handwriting is hard to read, the reader tends to be reading word by word, and that makes the overall scope or flow of the essay harder to keep track of.

Here are suggestions:

1. If you do not write legibly—and you know who you are—take the online test if at all possible.

2. Use black ink. While blue ink is usually OK, some scanned booklets were faint and harder to read. That probably meant the writer was using a lighter blue ink. Also, if your ink bleeds through the page, only write on one side of the page.

The way the test questions have been presented, you are given very specific guidelines. The guidelines come down to one word—Evidence!

Make your observations and support them with specific evidence. Take advantage of the online examples posted on AP Central. They show you what each type of essay, from 1 to 6, looks like. Consider those as models. If you can quote or paraphrase from the work or from a literary criticism, that is even better.

I would exhort students taking the test and teachers supervising them that they go over the scoring guides posted on AP Central so they have an idea of what the AP readers are looking for. They have specific examples of what works and what does not work. Also there will be sample essays that have been scored. Samples from this year’s tests will be available some time in July for teachers, and some time in August for students.

When I taught AP, I always assigned two term papers over the course of the year. That gave students a chance to really get into a particular work. That accomplished two things: (1) Students had a chance to use their critical reading and writing skills just as they would on the AP test, and (2) Students had a chance to go into more depth. If they could use one of the works they analyzed on the AP test, that gave them a real advantage.

You never know. One year I felt especially fortunate. The last work we read before the AP test in May that year was Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The open question that year was to write about the difference between country life and city life in a work. Wow! That kind of break does not usually happen, but going over term papers and outlines and character lists of works you read can really help.

Speaking of term papers, the AP reading normally has a session with a representative or representatives of the College Board speak. This year the representatives noted two things in particular.

1. Because of the success colleges have had with the new Seminar and Research AP tests, the Board is looking into the possibility of eliminating one or two of the essay questions on the AP English tests and replacing it or them with a research project similar to what the Seminar and Research AP programs do. This is by no means a done deal, but they are looking into the possibility with both English AP tests, Language as well as Literature. If they do, they will have to account for both plagiarism and AI. AI is becoming a challenge in the classroom as well as for the College Board.

2. It is very likely that some time in the not too distant future, the English AP tests will be entirely online. Again, there are some technical issues that have to be accounted for, viz., plagiarism and AI as we have seen as well as local Internet accessibility and security for those taking an online test. Even online test scorers sometimes had local problems reading or accessing tests they were supposed to score.

There is one other thing worth mentioning. Some students do not take the test because the schools they are applying to or that have accepted them do not give class credit for AP scores. Keep in mind that the principle behind the test is not school credit, though many schools give it, but placing students in more advanced classes than the usual freshman class. While I ended up majoring in English and eventually becoming an English teacher, I took the AP math test and got a good enough score that I could take the second year math class. I still had to take a math class, but I was placed in a more advanced class. After all, that is what the term advanced placement means.

If your college actually gives you credit for an AP score, that is a bonus, but that was not the original intent. Having said that, I have had students whose schools do give credit, and sometimes they can graduate early. That means they and/or their parents save money. It can also mean that they can begin grad school or a career track sooner. Even those who do not graduate early can take more specialized or higher level courses which can help them in getting into grad school or help them more in their chosen profession. (By grad school, I mean all kinds of schools—law, business, medicine, architecture, seminary, etc.—not just arts and sciences.)

Until recently, students could sign up for AP tests through March of the year they were taking the tests. Now they have to sign up by a date in November of the school year they will taking the test. The College Board reported to us that this has actually increased the number of students signing up for advanced classes who take the test. The biggest change has been with black females. Before the change, 58% of black female students who signed up ended up taking the English Lit AP test. Since then, 77% have. For the entire student population the change has been 9% more who have signed up take the test. One can cynically say that, yes, the College Board is taking in more registration fees, but the figures also show that students in AP are more committed to sticking with the program with the earlier registration.

The book Pitch Like Hollywood provides many examples from psychology experiments to show how a psychological state can affect both the presenter (the “pitcher”) and the audience. Some of these experiments used entrance exams and Advanced Placement tests. Test takers can learn from these.

On page 121 the book notes this about admissions tests and how similar they are to a sales pitch:

Gateway evaluations are stressful. These are tests that determine whether or not you gain admission to something. Ask any student who has her heart set on getting into Stanford how nervous she feels preparing for the SAT. Ask an applicant for a managerial position at a Fortune 500 company how he feels before going into that final interview. (121)

Ironically, this may demonstrate the law of unintended consequences. When I took the SAT, the College Board had never published any of its tests. Students were told that there was no way they could study for it, just do your best. Sure, we were nervous, but we did not worry about what we knew or did not know, we just “did our best.”

In the early 1980s New York State passed a law requiring that all gateway examinations including psychological tests and entrance exams had to be made public after they were conducted so that the test takers could see how they did and perhaps understand why they were or were not hired for a job or admitted to a school program.

This law went through the courts and finally, around 1985, the College Board was told by the New York Supreme Court that they had to start releasing their exams if they wanted to continue to conduct them in the state. They started publishing past SAT exams. People started examining the exams and soon there were all kinds of test preparation programs like Kaplan’s and the Princeton Review. The Princeton Review, Amsco, Barron’s, and others began publishing test review books.

I believe that, compared to when I took the SAT, students are much more nervous about these tests. Now they know what they are like. If someone says to them “Just do your best,” they are likely to reply, “But what if there are questions about something I haven’t studied or vocabulary I don’t understand?” Even before they take the test, they are already talking themselves out of doing well. Many studies have shown that if someone thinks they will not do well on something they are going to have to do, they really will not do as well. Pitch Like Hollywood reminds us of this a lot—if you think you are going to fail, you probably will.

It is easier said than done, but telling a student who is taking the SAT to do their best and not worry about it, really is not such a terrible idea. At best, realize there is nothing you can do about the “what ifs.”

A major factor in taking standardized tests is how you perceive yourself in your group identity. Yes, this is stereotyping, but we often stereotype ourselves.

We are all members of several demographic groups. Just about all of us have an age, an ethnicity, and a gender. All of these can be a source of negative predictions. (136)

One study done with Stanford undergraduate students had a group take a portion of the GRE, the Graduate Record Examination used by many graduate schools as part of their admissions process. Half the students were asked a series of background questions on their ethnicity, half were not. The African American students in the half that were asked about their ethnicity did not do as well as the African American students who were not asked questions about their ethnicity. Just this past week there was an article in the Wall Street Journal on beliefs about ethnic groups in school admissions.

Similarly, in another study, a two groups of Asian and White students were given the SAT. Before taking the test, one group was told that Asians do better than white students on the test, one group was not. The white students did not do as well as Asian students on the test, but only with the group who was told that there was a difference in outcomes according to ethnicity.

According to the authors of Pitch Like Hollywood, predictive stereotypes can be “fear-provoking albatrosses” that really are superficial if we can get beyond them. In fact, fear can work in your favor, just as “stage fright” can.

One study done with students taking a practice GRE divided students into two groups. One group was told that if they felt afraid about the test, they would do better. The other group was told nothing. “The group that was told anxiety symptoms would lead to better scores on the GRE practice test scored 50 points higher [out of 800] on the math section…They ended up scoring 65 points higher on the actual test they took several months later.” (178) The Educational Testing Service considers any score difference of more than 35 on one of their 800-based tests to be statistically significant.

Gender and racial stereotyping tell us that Asian students are good at math and that girls are not as good at math as boys. A group of Asian women were selected to take a math test. Before the test, half the group had to fill out a questionnaire on questions having to do with being a woman or a female. The other half had a questionnaire that asked them about being Asian. When the women took the test, the “women in the group who were surveyed about being female did worse than the other group of women who were surveyed about being Asian” (181).

In another study, girls did significantly better on the Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus test when they were asked about their gender after taking the test rather than before taking the test.

These results all speak for themselves. Avoid stereotyping yourself—or stereotyping others. If you are black and taking one of those tests, don’t worry about “acting white,” just do your best. If you are female, ditto when taking a math or science test. For everyone, understand how people can talk themselves out of doing well for superficial reasons or personal things over which they have no control, and use any nervousness to your advantage.

These observations are based on my experience with the English Literature AP (teacher, exam reader, exam reading table leader), but I am sure that they apply to English Language, History, and to some degree the Free Response Questions on any AP test (especially the part on legibility).

Develop your own introduction. Do not simply restate the question. Consider specifically what the question is asking. Normally, the question has two or three parts to it. Make sure that it answers each and all of the parts.

Generally the question involves a “What?” and a “How?” Do both. Sometimes the “What?” or “How?” will be the thesis, though often they provide the evidence to support the thesis. Normally, out of the “What?” and “How?” comes the Purpose of the essay. The Purpose is your thesis.

What makes for a good essay? A good thesis and good supporting evidence. (Where have you heard that before?)

Keep the essay focused on your thesis. The old saw, “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; tell ’em; tell ’em what you told ’em” still works.

Appropriate illustrations, especially from other literary works, can help liven the essay and demonstrate that you know what you are talking about.

Unless you are being repetitious or saying nothing, try to fill 3 or 4 pages, if possible. If your handwriting is small, two pages may be sufficient.

Read with a pencil or pen. This is especially helpful on the essay questions.

Take time to do an outline first. An experienced test-taker should take 5-10 minutes to organize the essay and come up with examples. This should allow enough time to write a thorough essay and still leave time to review it. It might be worth practicing this once or twice in a forty-minute block of time to check yourself.

A good introduction will get the reader’s attention. Remember that the reader will probably be reading somewhere between 900 and 1800 essays in seven or eight days. You want to get the reader’s attention in a positive way. Our AP U.S. History teacher used to say, “Give them a hook.” Do not simply restate the question. Focus on what the question was asking.

Be accurate. Know the author, the title, the names of the main characters, and details from the plot. Quotations or paraphrases of quotations can help. If you do not recall these things, choose another work. I recommend avoiding all historical references unless you are absolutely sure about them. (Obviously, you need them in history and government tests.)

Spelling has an effect, especially with words that appear on the test. One or two “typos” are not a problem, but consistent misspellings, especially key terms, titles, authors, characters, and the like will be noted. Be assured that the same applies for specialized terms (like literary terms) in whatever subject you are taking. One of the questions on the test I was scoring was about tragedy. Even though the word tragedy appeared four times on the test, readers still found over a dozen ways that students spelled the word. On the other hand, no one is probably going to be too hard on you if you misspell the name of a character in a Russian novel, as long as it is close. Readers do give you the benefit of the doubt because they understand it is a first draft, but if the spelling or grammar becomes annoying or interferes with comprehension, your score will be lower.

Write legibly. Readers are not going to be bothered to try to decipher handwriting or spelling they can’t read. Avoid double writing or any kind of distinctive flourish that interferes with readability. Do not use pencil for essays, it is less readable. Find out which kind of pen makes your writing look good and bring that with you to the reading. Practice your handwriting. Sometimes it is not a matter of neatness as it is of legibility. Having said that, too many cross-outs can be a distraction, especially if they are sloppy. If your ink bleeds through the paper, just write on one side of the page. Remember what the Bible says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Believe me, some readers get very angry at writing that is hard to read.

Readers are told to give low scores to essays that are “vacuous,” i.e., empty, containing nothing. How do they find vacuous essays? (1) If the essay is irrelevant, if what is written does not relate to the question asked at all. (2) If the essay merely repeats or restates the question, but does nothing with it. Sometimes this may mean that the essay analyzes or defines key terms but does not relate them to the question asked. Essays that use a lot of baloney fall into this category. (3) If the essay misses a major point or significance in either the question or the work being analyzed. (4) If the reader shows ignorance about the work being analyzed. (5) If the “thesis” says something like “A and B are similar in some ways and different in other ways.” Duh! You could say that about any two things in the universe!

Pray for your readers. Not just that they will give your test a fair reading, but that they will be fair and that the Lord would work in their lives.

Choose the Best Work You Can Work With. There are a number of works that commonly appear in the free writing essay. It will be vary some year to year depending on the topic. In 2003 the topic was tragedy. The most commonly cited works were Macbeth, Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, Oedipus Rex, Death of a Salesman, and Beloved. Clearly, the work had to be a tragedy—one student who tried to write about The Lord of the Rings was not going to get many points on his essay. Choose an appropriate and relevant work. Occasionally, you may hear someone advise you to avoid writing on widely read works, like Hamlet. That advice may help a little if your essay is not that good. Readers would love to read a good essay on a work that they have already read about numerous times. The contrast could help you. Write about a work that you know well and love.

Avoid preaching. This annoys readers as well. This applies not only to religious preaching, though a lot of college teachers especially hate that, but anything that comes across as “lecturing” the reader. Avoid expressions like “people ought” or “society needs to.” Judging a character in a book can be OK, but beware of judging “society” or “America.” It is not wise to announce “I am a vegetarian,” “I supported Trump/Biden,” or “I am a born-again Christian.” Having said that, if something in the reading points to vegetarianism or makes a Biblical allusion, point it out if it helps you answer the question. Both the AP Review book and several of the Chief Readers remind us that an understanding of the Bible and classical mythology helps us interpret a lot of art and literature.

Anticipate questions. You will probably not be able to come up with exactly the question asked, but you can try. Especially consider using works that you are intimately familiar with—works that you have read in detail or done extra work for or done a paper on. Of course, it still has to be appropriate and relevant. That student who used The Lord of the Rings for the tragedy used some direct quotations and some good details, but he or she still had a tough time convincing the reader it was a tragedy!

The Chief Reader, Gale Larson, provided the following advice after the 2001 English Lit. AP Reading:

• Tell students to read the prompt of each question very carefully. To think about the implications of the question, to begin thinking about how they will organize their responses, and to focus on what is asked of them are all important strategies in beginning the writing task.
• Often, students are asked to select a play or a novel to answer a particular question. Make sure they know that the work they have selected should be appropriate to the question asked. See to it that students have a fair range of readings that they feel familiar with, ones with which they can test the implications of the question and make the decision of the appropriateness of the work to the question asked. Without this flexibility they may force an answer that will come across as canned to the AP Reader. (Most teachers tell their students to review a minimum of four or five works—at least two novels and a comedy and a tragedy—to get refreshed on the details.)
• Remind students to enter into the text itself, to supply concrete illustrations that substantiate the points they are making. Have them take command of what they are writing with authority by means of direct quotation of pertinent information from the text, always writing into the question and never away from it. Help them to keep their point of view consistent, to select appropriate material for supporting evidence, and to write in a focused and succinct manner.
• Remind your students that films are not works of literature and cannot be used to provide the kind of literary analysis required on the exam. Beware of referring to a film version of a book for an example (e.g., the “library scene” in Hamlet, the assassination of Marlowe or Col. Kurtz, Hester and Dimmesdale in a hot tub, ad infinitum).
• Advise your students that, when starting an essay, they should avoid engaging in a mechanical repetition of the prompt and then supplying a list of literary devices. Instead, get them to think of ways to integrate the language of literature with the content of that literature, making connections that are meaningful and telling, engaging in analysis that leads to the synthesis of new ideas. Pressure them into using higher levels of critical thinking; have them go beyond the obvious and search for a more penetrating relationship of ideas. Make them see connections that they missed on their first reading of the text.

Reflections on the 2021 English Literature Advanced Placement Reading

Once again I was an AP essay reader. Like last year, everything was done online. This year I was a virtual table leader responsible for my “table” of eleven readers. The table leader passes on information to the table and checks to see how accurately they are reading. The goal this year was that table leaders should read ten percent of the essays that their table scored to see how they are doing—to both encourage and to correct where needed. This new position gave me a slightly different perspective on the test, but it did confirm in my own mind that the AP program with its many years of experience knows what it is doing. Students taking the test can be confident that their tests are treated with respect. I thought I had a reliable and accurate table of readers.

This year I had the poetry question, question number one. Students and teachers can download a copy of the three essay questions on the printed test at AP Central online. I believe in my years as a reader that I have had the poetry question more than any of the other two.

Historically, students skip the poetry question more than the others. Apparently, poetry is not taught as much in schools these days. Back in the thirties and forties when my parents were in school, poetry was much bigger. My mother would recite poems to me she had had to memorize when she was in school.

This year was different, though. The poem, “The Saxophone Player” by Ai Ogawa, was nearly contemporary (1985) and was pretty straightforward. A greater proportion of students answered the poetry question than usual. Here are few hints from what I have observed from this year’s reading.

The question asked for “literary elements and techniques.” Some essays pointed out some techniques but did not do anything with that information that led to a thesis. For example, a student reading “A Red, Red Rose” might have pointed out “My love is like a red, red rose” is a simile. That is correct. But the important question is “So what?” How does the simile contribute to the effect of the poem or the meaning of the poem or whatever your thesis was?

The best essays kept the focus on the thesis. The best theses usually had a ring of originality to them. The question being asked about the poem “analyze how [the poet] uses literary elements to convey the complexity of the speaker’s encounter with the saxophone player…” A pedestrian thesis might be something like “the poet uses three figures of speech to illustrate the speaker’s meeting with the saxophone player.” That adds a little to the prompt, to the question being asked, but not much.

What would be more original or more “complex” would be to say how the poet meeting the saxophone player affected the poet in a specific way. The best essays noted that a change had taken place in the poet’s outlook—at least temporarily—and we can all learn something or appreciate that moment. I might add that there were some interesting interpretations, but if the essay writer supported the interpretation with evidence from the poem, from other sources, and uses reasonable logic, the student will get an “upper half” score (4,5, or 6 out of 6).

One other important hint I pass on to students regardless of what AP test they take. This year students were given the option of taking the written test as usual. They also could have taken the test on a different date online. There was software to download and protocols to follow, but they could.

Because the reading was online, the essay booklets were scanned by the Educational Testing Service and uploaded to the readers. The readers then read them on their computer screens. It was a little harder and quite a bit slower to read an essay posted online compared to reading the original exam booklet. This was an especial problem with handwriting that was hard to read. There were one or two that used ink that bled through the paper that made the writing hard to read. The solution to that is to simply write on one side of the paper.

The big problem was that some students’ handwriting is hard to read. In most cases the students know who they are. While readers really are trained to be impartial, if they have to decipher every word as they read, they do lose the train of thought. I suspect some students might have done better if they could have typed their essays.

Here is my recommendation. If the College Board continues with the online option next year, those of you whose handwriting is hard to read (and you know who you are) take the online test if you can. You type that. Your thinking will be much easier to trace and to understand. I realize that in some schools and districts, you might not have that choice, but if you do and your handwriting is hard to read, take the online exam.

I had a friend who had one of the online questions. Because fewer students took the online offering than the pen and pencil version, she finished early and spent the last two or three days of the week reading questions from the booklets like most of the other readers. She said not only did it go slower, but it was a lot harder to read them. The twenty or thirty percent of you whose handwriting is hard to read, take a hint. You will be glad you did, and so will the person or people who read your essay.

Obviously, this applies to any AP test that has free-response questions. Math, science, and history readers would appreciate it as well.

I noted two things on some essays that I believe reflect the times. A few essays stood out as being Marxist. Now part of that had to do with the description of the musician in the poem who looked lower class, while the poet did not sound that way. In the past, I have read essays from other passages that could have been interpreted with a Marxist flavor, such as the passage from Lawrence’s The Rainbow on the 2013 exam, but I do not recall any. Marxism does tend to oversimplify things, but it is taught in many university English departments these days, so such interpretations are not surprising. With the two leaders of Black Lives Matter boasting they are “trained Marxists,” class conflict seems to have become part of the zeitgeist.

The other thing that a number of readers noticed was that there was a more common use of them as a singular. In this past, this would have likely been part of an essay that generally displayed poor grammar. Not now. It is clear that some essays used them in order not to be gender-specific. It remains to be seen whether such language will be carried on, but that, too, is a sign of the times.

Old English was like German and Latin in that it had three genders. The declensions could have been called anything, but we use the terms masculine, feminine, and neuter. The genders were lost in Middle English except for the personal pronouns because people use them all the time. In early Modern English around 1600 we lost the general use of thee and thou for second person singular. You became singular as well as plural. Could something like that happen with he, she, and it? I guess time will tell.

My hope is that if this does change, people won’t be judging earlier writing. In the 1700s, for example, people used the word savage simply to mean someone who was tribal or uncivilized. It had little connotation one way or the other. Rousseau, indeed, spoke of the “noble savage.” Robinson Crusoe loved Friday, but he called him a savage because he was not from a literate urban environment. Now sometimes people read Rousseau or Defoe and suggest they were racist because they used such a word even though they were not. One hopes that people in the future will not read something with he and she and assume the writer must be sexist.

This is a tribute to all the Advanced Placement English Literature Exam readers this year, especially those with Question 1 that had a passage from the recent novel The Age of Light. We note that back in 2003, the A. P. English Lit prose selection featured another North American expat woman in Paris.

The school is quiet, the only other workers the custodial staff, the lower half of their faces covered with N-95 masks. A couple of Dunkin Donuts paper cups curl around Mr. A. P. Little’s laptop with its built-in camera, which he has brought to school though the school has some PCs he could have used.

Just before he checked out of the hotel at last year’s A. P. reading, his roommate asked him if he wanted a set of range finders for Question 3. Not all of them had a score on them, but he could figure it out. When he got back home, he would sort them out as he sat in a lawn chair in his yard. Those plans did not work out as expected, though, because A. P. range finders (they call them benchmarks now) adopted the new 1-4-1 scoring system.

The maintenance supervisor stops by and tells him he is going on a Starbucks run and asks if he would like anything. A. P. hesitates, thinking about the coffee buzz he feels right now, but he says yes. Even though the Dunkin Dark Roast is still circulating through his veins, he needs a reason to stay awake this afternoon, especially if he gets two hours of mostly twos and threes as he did yesterday.

He decided to work from the school to do the Advanced Placement reading. He had done the last third of the school year doing Zoom classes from home with students who missed the school as much he did. The only advantage to being at home is that there are no study halls to monitor and no commute. He has been going bug-eyed putting electronic sticky notes onto Turnitin assignments. At least now all he has to do is press a couple of buttons after reading the essay—anything to pass the time and forget how lonely we all feel.

A. P. had never been great staying at home. Other than mowing the lawn, ogling his beautiful wife, and playing video games, there is not much to do when everyone is sheltered in place. As the weeks have gone by, he has learned to weigh himself daily to avoid gaining weight. Taking the laptop to the school is better for this job. Even so, he can see the icon for Minecraft on the laptop’s taskbar. He is conscious of its presence, almost like squishy tentacles with round suckers to pull him in and drown him.

But he knows that if he slacks off during the reading he will be demoted and get his blue stars taken away. The maintenance supervisor picks up his empty coffee cups, and A. P. can tell he is wondering why he came to school.

“Are you doing some kind of summer school?” he finally asks. A. P. is reading about Miss Lee’s complex conflicts and isn’t really paying attention to what was just said. When he doesn’t respond, the building chief nods his head toward the computer screen.

“No, I’m reading English Lit Advanced Placement essays.”

Since he’s started, he’s read lots of stories about the challenges of moving to a new city and read lots of essays that state the obvious: Lee is lonely, the waiter has a narrow mustache, Paris and New York are on different continents. He had one today that was blank. Another one ten minutes later he had to put on Temporary Hold. He couldn’t read it and wanted to see if his Table Leader could decipher it.

Ah, but then he had one that made him remember why he had signed up for the job in the first place: Five detailed paragraphs, explaining symbols, finding complimentary images, referring to two other relevant works of literature, making a solid thesis, and a conclusion discussing its significance for young Lee. It filled A. P. with pleasure that he would remember weeks later. A. P. silently confessed that even though he had been teaching literature for twenty years, he could not have written such a good essay in less than an hour himself.

He turned to his right where he subconsciously expected to see a table mate and say, “You’ve got to see this one!” Only there is no one there. There is not even a way to flag it to show to the Table Leader. At least the lockdown at the reading a couple of years ago was with other English teachers.

The maintenance supervisor has headed out the door with A. P.’s Starbucks order as the ONE program dinged to tell him someone has posted a chat. A. P. turned to his computer screen to read an essay exclaiming how challenging it is for someone to do things in a different way. Miss Lee, we have all run into that this year.

June 2020

For another work inspired by an A.P. Exam question, click here.

I learned this year that students skip the poetry question more frequently than the other two. (One other essay is based on a prose selection, and the third is based on a work that the student selects.) It has nothing to do with the topic or time period. Students skip sixteenth century poems as frequently as those by poets who are still living. Apparently some students do not have much experience or comfort with poems, even those students taking the AP test.

From reading AP essays this year, I would give some advice to would-be AP test takers. First and foremost, have a thesis that answers the question.

Ask yourself, “So what?” Why is this topic significant or important? Make sure everything in the essay directs the reader toward the thesis.

Beware of lists of rhetorical devices or figures of speech in the essay. From the AP perspective, the main reason that you ought to learn common literary terms and figures of speech is for the multiple choice questions. We were told there are typically five to seven multiple-choice questions that have specific literary terms that students ought to know.

The purpose of the essay is to make a discovery or get the reader thinking. That fact that a passage has a simile in line 4, alliteration in line 15, and an overall ironic tone is probably already obvious to the reader. They are, after all, teachers and professors trained in the subject!

What you need to do is make a discovery. If you note those three things, for example, then ask how do that simile, alliteration, or irony help answer the question being asked. That is what is important. If the simile does not help you support your thesis, do not do anything with it. The reader is not going to be too impressed that you know what a simile is.

What will impress the reader is showing how the simile itself points to an ironic tone, the alliteration suggests a sound given by a two-faced person, and the irony is a clue to understanding the question asked and a life lesson the author is trying to get across!

Take a look at sample essays. AP Central posts some every year. We were told by the College Board that the average (mean) for each essay in last year’s English Literature AP test was around 4.1 or 4.2. Look at the sample 4 and 5 essays. If you are an AP student, you should be able to handle those and see how they are done.

Then check out some sample 6s and 7s. Again, you can get them from AP Central, from your teacher, or from AP review books. What do you need to do to raise or sustain your writing at that level? Look at the question, the thesis, and the way the examples support the thesis.

Then, when you have the courage, check out the 8s and 9s. If necessary, ask your teacher about them. What makes them superior? What theses do they have? How do they handle evidence? What discovery do they make?

Always remember this: The AP English Literature test is made for students who read. If you read a lot of good writing, you are going to be more likely to write well. Avoid the lists, and get to the heart of the matter. Be sure to include some poetry in your reading so you don’t feel obliged to skip the poetry questions.

Beware of telling us that the writer uses, utilizes, or employs something. That includes cognates like the nouns use, utilization, and employment. Remember, too, that usage means something that does not normally apply to writing unless you are noting something about the grammar! Hey, sometimes you have to use those words. I just did. But if you start off by saying something like “the author uses” and then follow it with your list of two or three things, you probably already have the reader saying to himself or herself, “This sounds like another three or four.”

Ask yourself, “So what?” And read, read, read.

Notes from our 2014 AP Reading Experience

Notes from our 2015 AP Reading Experience

Click here to get to the AP Central web page which has previous test questions, scoring guidelines, and sample scored essays posted

Click here for a set of essay scoring guidelines (from 2015)